’70s Sex Star Fascinates a New Era

AS the artificial smoke was flushed out and the extras wearing wide lapels and garish miniskirts were led in during a break in filming here at the Alex Theater, a neo-Classical movie house and performance space, Amanda Seyfried was recalling a recent goodbye she’d shared with her father.

Production was just starting on her latest movie, and “I thought he was going to be, like, ‘I love you, I’ll miss you so much,’ ” said Ms. Seyfried, 26, whose cherubic face and dewy eyes have graced many a magazine cover. “But he was, like: ‘It’s in your hands. Tell her story.’ And it was really intense, like tears in his eyes.”

She added, “He’s just so proud that I have the opportunity to be responsible for that.”

The opportunity Ms. Seyfried and her father meant is the title role in “Lovelace,” an independent film about Linda Lovelace, the pornographic movie actress and star of “Deep Throat,” the hard-core 1972 feature that broke box office records and became a cultural sensation. And Ms. Seyfried’s excitement to play her may be equaled or surpassed by the awfulness of a life that no one would wish to live.

To Ms. Seyfried, who has played girls on the verge of womanhood in films like “Mamma Mia!” and on the HBO series “Big Love,” her part in “Lovelace” is an unapologetic bid to prove she can play more daring, decidedly grown-up characters.

“This film is really, I feel, the beginning of something else for me,” said the actress, who was un-self-consciously sporting a frilly, translucent white dress that showed off a bit more than her silhouette.

To her co-stars and collaborators “Lovelace” is, they hope, a blend of the studied naïveté of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” with the gravity of a real-life story.

But for the film industry Lovelace’s tale is not just the latest example of harrowing reality transmuted into celluloid fantasy. It is also, improbably, the subject matter that two competing films, including “Lovelace,” are vying to bring to reputable theaters.

While “Deep Throat” went mainstream and was immortalized as the code name of a Watergate source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Lovelace (born Linda Boreman) led a life of cruelty and degradation.

Photo

Linda LovelaceCredit
Agence France-Presse

In a 1980 memoir, “Ordeal,” she said she had been forced into her illicit career by her first husband, Chuck Traynor, who physically and verbally abused her. Aligning herself with feminists like Gloria Steinem, Lovelace spent several years as an anti-pornography advocate, only to appear in a 2001 pictorial in Leg Show magazine. She died in 2002 from injuries she suffered in a car accident.

The “Lovelace” directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose previous features include the 2010 feature “Howl,” which starred James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, said this film would evolve in tone as it chronicled its protagonist’s ascent, decline and ’80s-era redemption.

“You’re along with her psychology at the different stages of her life,” Mr. Epstein said, “and when she’s ready to look at her life differently, we’re ready to tell the story differently.”

Mr. Friedman added, “Her story bridges the period from the sexual revolution to feminism, and she was a key figure in both of those moments.”

There is comedy too in the film’s fastidious re-creations of Ms. Lovelace’s cheaply made cinematic breakthrough, in which she played a woman who learns that her clitoris is in her throat.

Adam Brody, the “OC” actor, who grew a fuzzy mustache to play the “Deep Throat” co-star Harry Reems, said that those sex scenes with Ms. Seyfried were “by far the lightest, silliest stuff in the movie.”

“It’s more ‘American Pie’ than it is Lars von Trier,” Mr. Brody said.

Moments of lightness and darkness were equally at play in a sequence being filmed this late January afternoon, as the Lovelace character is introduced to an audience just after a “Deep Throat” screening hosted by Playboy’s founder, Hugh Hefner (portrayed by Mr. Franco).

While she twirls and poses awkwardly for the approving crowd, she is spotted from the back of the theater by Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who casts a sinister gaze on her.

Mr. Sarsgaard, who has played memorable psychopaths in films like “Boys Don’t Cry,” said afterward that the violence he is called on to perform in “Lovelace” made him disinclined to take the role, particularly now that his wife, the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, is pregnant with their second child. But Mr. Sarsgaard said he reconsidered after Ms. Gyllenhaal encouraged him. “She was like, ‘I think it would be a great movie for you to do right now,’ ” he said.

“Knowing that your wife would support you,” he said, was crucial because “it’s the trust all around on a thing like this.”

Casting proved an overall challenge for “Lovelace”: women were concerned about the nudity and the brutality, while the agents of male performers withheld the script, written by Andy Bellin, from their clients.

Throughout this day’s shoot Ms. Markel, her fellow producers and the “Lovelace” directors slipped in and out of clandestine meetings as they scrambled to find a new actress to play their Gloria Steinem, after Demi Moore dropped out because of personal problems. (The following day it was announced that Sarah Jessica Parker would take over the role.)

Adding to the sense of urgency is the fact that another biographical film, called “Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story,” is in preproduction. Once set to star Lindsay Lohan (who appeared with Ms. Seyfried in the teen comedy “Mean Girls”), it now features Malin Akerman (“Watchmen”) as Lovelace and Matt Dillon as Traynor (who died in 2002), and is scheduled to start filming in March.

Ms. Markel, who was previously attached as a producer of “Inferno,” said that that film had “a good script,” but that “it was so dark and oppressive.”

Before leaving the project, Ms. Markel said, she told her collaborators at the time, “We have to find the levity in this movie, because otherwise audiences are going to reject this.”

Matthew Wilder, the writer and director of “Inferno,” said it was he who parted ways with Ms. Markel because he feared that she and her executive producer, Avi Lerner (“The Expendables”), would tamper with his work in postproduction.

“I think it is quite a wonderful piece of hyperbole to be told your film is too dark to be a movie,” Mr. Wilder wrote in an e-mail.

Photo

A poster from the biopic with Amanda Seyfried.Credit
Dale Robinette

Noting that his “Inferno” script had been cited by The Black List, a movie-industry survey of well-regarded screenplays, many of which have not yet been filmed, Mr. Wilder said the quality of the work, and not the speed of production, would determine the winner in the Lovelace race.

Though her face could be seen in black-and-white with bright red lipstick on recreated “Deep Throat” posters around the Alex Theater, Ms. Seyfried was not concerned that she would be tarnished by her “Lovelace” role.

She said she was not bothered by pornography (“I don’t watch it, but I get it”) and, after reading Lovelace’s “Ordeal” and a follow-up memoir, “Out of Bondage,” had gained a better understanding of a woman who she said was only ever seeking approval, no matter the highly unusual ways she sought it.

Now, Ms. Seyfried said, “I’d want to make her happy.” She continued, “That’s first and foremost what I’d want. I’d want to make her happy if she were alive today.”

Earlier that afternoon Ms. Seyfried had acted in a scene with Mr. Franco that finds Lovelace on the cusp of her own transitional opportunity. In the theater’s balcony their characters are watching the “Deep Throat” screening in semi-seclusion, and Hugh Hefner takes the opportunity both to pay a compliment to Lovelace and take advantage of her.

Lovelace appears embarrassed by her performance, but Hefner tells her she has the potential to be a real star.

“Trust me, you are going to stay around as long as you want,” he says. “You know how life sometimes imitates art? I think this is one of those moments.”

In the context of “Lovelace” this is his invitation for her to perform a sex act on him, but the larger point was taken too.

A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2012, on page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: ’70s Sex Star Fascinates A New Era. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe